Cod, bass, and shad are good for baking. Stuff them with a seasoning made of bread crumbs or crackers, butter, salt, pepper, and, if you like, spices. Put the fish in a bake-pan, with a tea-cup of water, and a bit of butter, and bake from forty-five to sixty minutes.
Cod Sounds and Tongues.
Soak them four hours in blood-warm water, then scrape off the skin, cut them up, and stew them in a little milk till tender. Just before taking up stir in butter, and a little flour paste, and scatter cold boiled eggs cut up over them.
To Cook Salt Codfish.
Soak the fish in a pailful of water all night. Then hang it in a good deal of water where it will be kept warm. Put one even great spoonful of saleratus in the water. (This last softens it as nothing else will do.) Change the water an hour before dinner, and hang it where it will get scalding hot. It must not boil, but only simmer. Take it up into a napkin, so as to keep it dry and hot.
To Cook Cold Codfish.
Mash boiled potatoes, mash the fish and mix with them, adding some cream or milk, and a little pepper, make them into round cakes an inch thick, and fry them in fresh lard.
To Cook Oysters.
Oysters are best roasted in the shell, convex side downward, to hold the juices, and cooked till they will open well. They are good also cooked in a batter made by adding wheat flour to the juice till it is a batter, and adding two eggs and a salt spoonful of salt. Fry in hot lard to a light brown.